Saturday, February 28, 2009

The Cleo Songbook, Month Seven

The key to Cleo's taste in music is: quantity, not quality. She'll tolerate almost any length of car trip, even when she's fussy, as long as the singing flows without ceasing. This works out very well for me, since I'm not much of a singer, but boy do I have stamina. The best songs (besides the evil "Song That Never Ends") for singing forever are ones that combine a singable tune and a structure that lends itself to stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Some songs that have proved effective:

-She'll Be Coming 'Round The Mountain, since she'll also be doing any number of other things that have the right number of syllables, like:
She'll be driving to the market.
She'll be wearing her sunglasses.
She'll be flipping off the jerkwads.
She'll be hunting for some parking.
She'll be scaring off the pigeons.
She'll be turning off the engine.
(this is the grocery store version, as you may have gathered)

-The Wheels On The Bus, since there can be a lot more things on the bus than you might have thought...
The jocks on the bus go "Dude, that's sweet!"
The kids on the bus say "Yo, wassup?"
The grandmas on the bus say "What's that, sonny?"
The girls on the bus say "That's my phone!"

-And finally, the tune of My Country 'Tis Of Thee (Or God Save The Present Monarch), which for some reason lends itself beautifully to the singing out loud of random road signs (try it, it's fun):

My country 'tis of thee
sweet land of liberty
stop light ahead.
Providence twenty miles
Fall River Exit four
from ev'ry mountainside
Pete's Lube and Gas.

1 comment:

Muslim Hippie said...

My toddler girl started adding her own lyrics to her favorite tunes too. Hereʻs one of my favorite added lyrics: Old mac Donald had a farm.. and on his farm he had a nose..with a sniff sniff here(she squishes her nose in this part) and a sniff sniff there...